


Somebody's Darling

by MarkoftheAsphodel



Category: Fire Emblem Echoes: Mou Hitori no Eiyuu Ou | Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, Fire Emblem Series
Genre: Classic Mode Game Mechanics, Complicated Relationships, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Post-Game(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-15
Updated: 2017-06-15
Packaged: 2018-11-14 06:19:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11202213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarkoftheAsphodel/pseuds/MarkoftheAsphodel
Summary: Normally Python would be the last person entrusted with a mission requiring sensitivity and diplomacy. This time, though, he has some special qualifications for it. Takes place after the end of the main story but before the post-war order really takes shape.





	Somebody's Darling

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the Lukas/Python support chain from the Rise of the Deliverance DLC. Was originally a scene in a longer, different story that broke up the tone too much and had to go off on its own. Read what you will into the dynamics involving Python, Lukas, and Forsyth.

Forsyth wants to take the mission the way he wants to do everything; his face grows flushed and pale in turn as he proclaims it his natural duty. Sir Clive meanwhile proposes that _he_ handle it personally, claiming that a senior officer ought to be the one to console a fallen knight’s fiancee. Python goes straight to King Alm to bypass them both and get the assignment for himself.

“Lukas talked about her to me. I have a better idea of what I’m getting into than these two ever will and I promise I won’t say anything stupid.”

And the new king grants his request and puts the sad little packet of letters in Python’s care. Clive makes that face he makes when he doesn’t agree with something but doesn’t have the wits to put together a rebuttal while Forsyth huffs in Python’s direction all the way back to their quarters that there couldn’t be anyone worse on this earth to break the news to some poor lady that her beloved was gone.

Python does his best to just ignore it but as Forsyth’s volume mounts he wheels around to snap at his companion.

“Will you shut up for one minute? D’you think I’d be going out of my way to get permission to march to the ass-end of nowhere for no reason other than to talk to the girl Lukas left behind if there wasn’t something to it?”

“No, your adamance about doing this task is completely uncharacteristic, Python.” Forsyth’s eyes soften and his brow furrows, almost like a confused hunting dog. “Actually, you puzzle me. I can’t for the life of me—”

Forsyth cuts himself off and the two of them stand facing one another down, so close each can feel the other’s breath.

“I trust you to do right by our comrade,” says Forsyth, and the leap of faith he’s making shows in every strained muscle of his face.

“Right.”

And Python starts to pack his bags for the frontier.

-x-

Python has a solid enough idea in his head of what Lukas’s ladyfriend will be. The hand behind the packet of letters in his coat will belong to someone pretty in an unremarkable way, amiable and competent enough to manage a household. Whatever color her hair might’ve been, it’ll be stained gold or copper to emulate the high noble houses and royalty. Another example of the backwater nobility, she won’t have much more than a manor house and manners to set her apart from the wealthier of the bourgeoisie. Basically, a cut-rate version of Lady Clair with fewer redeeming qualities and still fewer obnoxious ones. And since he knows in his gut that her claim as a “fiancee” or a “betrothed” or anything of the sort is a bit of poetic fancy on the part of saps like Sir Clive, Python doesn’t really expect she’s been pacing up and down the balcony with a lamp in her hand awaiting the day Lukas comes home.

Python hopes she’s taken a lover in the meantime. It’ll give him even more reason to make this delivery quick.

It turns out the manor house doesn’t even have a balcony, but other than that the place doesn’t shake his expectations any. There’s an arch of roses over the path and little orange trees in pots by the door. The roses have black spots on their leaves and only a few sad shrunken oranges cling to the potted trees. There’s also a patch of peonies whose fluffy petals are a rich, soft red— somewhere between ancient rust and weathered bricks— that brings Lukas to mind immediately.

They’re withering.

As he lifts one of the bronze knockers on the double doors, its design of a grotesque bearded face transports Python for a moment back in space and time to the sacred springs tucked into the recess of a temple. Which spring, he doesn’t remember, but he can feel the damp on his face and the way the blessed water mingles with rotten air as he breathes it and tastes it. Then the wood under his fingers is real again and he’s standing in a beam of afternoon sunlight amid the tatters of a formal garden.

The door opens, and he guesses immediately that the woman standing there looking reasonably well-fed and well-dressed is no servant to the noble house. She’s of medium height, with dark hair parted in the middle and pulled back in a coil. Sunlight falling across the threshold puts a violet sheen into her hair and her smooth oval face is passably pretty but mostly just seems… perceptive. There’s something keen in her dark eyes. A schoolteacher face, Python thinks, and something clicks in his brain.

“Lady Beatrice?”

“Yes.”

“Name’s Python. I fought in the Deliverance alongside Lukas.”

Her face contorts enough as Python speaks her “beloved’s” name that Python’s glad he’s the one on the doorstep. Forsyth would already be reaching for a handkerchief for both of them.

“Come in, Sir Python.”

“Just Python,” he says as he steps past her.

“I’m sorry,” she says at once. “I know the world is changing. It doesn’t change much here.”

There’s just enough apology in her voice for this provincial hell and its ways that Python almost warms a little to her. It’s a nice voice, low and clear, and not a damned thing like Lady Clair’s.

It’s dark inside the manor house and Python has the instant impression that this is an old man’s house as bequeathed to a spinster. Old paintings, old furniture, everything in sight just about ready to be sent to a museum of Zofian culture. Python sees at least three different shelves crammed with books as Beatrice takes him to the parlour, which at least has a big picture window to let in the sun.

“I am so grateful to you and the Deliverance for coming to me,” Beatrice says as she serves him tea and biscuits with orange marmalade on the side. “I’d heard the rumors that Lukas had fallen but his family never told me anything.”

Nothing in that surprises Python.

“I never expected him to come home,” she continues. “The last time we parted, he seemed indifferent to… to everything, I suppose, but mostly to his own future.”

“Yeah, well it’s not like he exactly wanted to go.” Python doesn’t know how much to tell her there… doesn’t yet know himself what she deserves to hear.

“I surmised that much.”

So Lukas hadn’t directly let on to his ladyfriend about what a sack of shit his brother was. Typical Lukas. Python noticed the mole on her chin when they stood on the doorstep and he studies it now as Beatrice sits across from him with downcast eyes like some sculptor’s model posing for a study of perfectly restrained grief. That’s a little detail he’ll keep to himself. As Python’s now guessing that there is no new lover, or family, or anyone for this Lady Beatrice other than some dying plants in the garden and a pile of books, he decides to give her some of the comfort he wasn’t planning to extend when he set out on this mission.

“Well he landed in our midst with a splash. Put his foot wrong a couple of times in the early days but then shot up the ranks to be Sir Clive’s right-hand man. I was with him pretty much the entire time.”

It occurs to Python now how little Beatrice might actually know of what Lukas even did. He pushes the tea-tray away; the marmalade is so sickening in its sweetness he can’t even taste the bite of the orange-rind in all the sugar.

“You understand he basically sparked the whole war on Rigel by bringing Alm to the Deliverance and sticking up for him as our new leader? The king wouldn’t be on his throne right now if Lukas hadn’t decided to take a chance on him.”

As she leans into his words, Python can see something going on in her eyes. She’s trying to figure out if he’s telling her flattering lies.

“Also… you know the scenes in war stories where someone makes a speech from the ramparts and it saves the day? Yeah, he did that once too. We all lived to fight another day because of what he said from the walls of Zofia Castle.” Python has no intention of telling Beatrice what Lukas said that day and he hopes she never finds out. “Yeah. He was the right man in the right place when everyone needed him to be.”

“So his brother did the entire world a favor,” she says, bitter enough that the corners of Python’s mouth tug upwards as he recognizes… well, nothing so gooey as a kindred spirit, but someone with whom he shares a little scrap of something despite the bloodlines dividing them.

“Yeah, you could look at it that way.”

Python takes this as his opportunity to hand Beatrice the packet of her own letters to Lukas. He hasn’t read any of them and now he’s kind of sorry for taking pains to be discreet when it would’ve cost him nothing to rifle through that packet and learn something of Lukas that is forever lost to him the moment Beatrice takes those letters back.

“A first he wrote me every week…”

Python doesn’t make excuses, easy as it would be to blame bandits or greedy unreliable merchants. He already has the feeling this isn’t the sort of lady who’d swallow the defenses that Forsyth might’ve stammered out to save face. If Lukas never quivered with ardent desire in the confines of Beatrice’s parlour, ten to one she already picked up on that.

“He was thinking about you,” Python says as Beatrice fusses with the ribbon holding the packet of letters together. “Took awhile to get anything personal out of him because he kept his cards close to his chest but I teased your existence out of him eventually. He didn’t know what the future was going to hold, but he didn’t forget you.”

This is exactly as far as Python is willing to go in consoling the woman who was never going to be the Mathilda to Lukas’s Clive. It’s followed by a pause so long Python feels he can actually see the sunbeams creeping across the wall. He thinks back on his earlier hope that The Ladyfriend had taken up with somebody else while Lukas was away and he hopes that Beatrice does exactly that now that she knows the truth. Something needs to lighten up this place that’s halfway to being a crypt, and it won’t be Beatrice on her own. He almost pities her— family dead, servants probably run off during the famine, and her soldier-boy is never coming back.

Not that Lukas ever was. Python may’ve been all wrong about the lady left behind, but he’s sure he wasn’t wrong about that.

Python can see the next question forming in her face before she asks it, and it takes her a couple of attempts to force out the words.

“Lukas… how much did he suffer?”

“Well, I can’t say he didn’t know what hit him, but it could’ve been worse.” Python doesn’t want to go into what Rigelian black magic does, because it’d take someone who’d been there and seen it to understand it or even believe it. “I wish I had something more to offer you, but I don’t.”

“No… you’ve done so much already.” There’s a tremor creeping into her voice, but she clears her throat with a little cough and says, “You are welcome to stay the night.”

It’s not a proposition, just good old-fashioned hospitality with no strings attached. And if it had been a proposition, Python would’ve been even less interested than he is in spending more time in Beatrice’s sad museum of a manor house.

“Nice of you to offer, but I need to be a ways down the road by nightfall. So, if you’ll excuse me?”

“Yes, of course.”

She ushers him back through the high-ceilinged rooms adorned with the painted eyes of dead men. Python wishes, a second too late, that he’d taken a better look at the books in case Forsyth ever asks him about the house. Forsyth will want that kind of detail once he gets done having a cry over poor Lady Beatrice in her grief and isolation.

Python steps into the light of the golden hour before dusk, but before he is fully outside he turns back to see Beatrice framed in the gloom of her doorway.

“I’m glad I got to meet you,” he says. “I think I understand why Lukas spent so much time courting you.”

And her face crumples again in a way that would shatter the heart of a different sort of man.

“Python… I’m so glad to have met one of his friends.” She’s not doing the best job of holding back the tears anymore. “Any time you pass through this town, you’ll be welcome here.”

Python just waves a goodbye, letting some of his usual languid insolence flow through his body after keeping it under control during their conversation. He never plans to set foot in this damned place again. Once he hears the double doors latch behind him, sealing Beatrice back in her mausoleum, Python lets his fingers slip into the peony patch. He breaks off one of those red flowers and it hangs loosely between his fingers, where it looks just like Lukas with his head bobbing as Python picked him up off the filthy floor of Nuibaba’s lair.

“I’m gonna forget I ever figured that you spent month after month here doing some kind of charade in hopes the sky would open up with rainbows and birdsong for both of you,” he says to the sunburnt flower. “The lady had some nice things to read and I’m sure her marmalade hit your sweet tooth just right, and that’s enough for me to tell Forsyth that you’d have been a lovely couple. And the rest of it stays between me and you and her forever.” 

Python sets the flower down among the yellow leaves that blanket the ground beneath one of Beatrice’s orange trees. He steals a sprig out of her herb garden on his way out the gate.

“I said I was the man for this mission.” 

Python flexes his fingers out in front of him. It’s a long road back to the capital, and he has the bitter taste of satisfaction in between his teeth.

**The End**

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a reference to one of the most sentimental grief-related poems to come out of the American Civil War, the sort of thing the deaths of promising young men traditionally inspire. One can only imagine what Python would think of it (hint: very little). 
> 
> Given the way game mechanics do work in Classic Mode up through the end of the main game, there is a great deal behind Python's statement that he can't say Lukas didn't know what hit him, but that's something for another day...


End file.
